Chris Mackie

Asus Eee PC 1001ha Wireless Fix

I’m typing this using an Asus Eee PC 1001ha running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04. It took a wee bit of struggling to get the wireless working but thanks to an article on the Ubuntu Wiki, I was able to get it working.

However, there is a further issue that occurs every time there’s a kernal upgrade. Having had a working wireless network connection, the Network Manager ceases to work when the new kernel is installed.

One solution is, of course, to stick with the previous, working kernel.  However, I have discovered the following (relatively) easy fix, that needs to be followed when a new kernel is released.

‘lspci’ from the command line informs that that the 1001ha has an onboard RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe card.  After much Google-ing, I found that the following command will rebuild the offending kernel module:

dpkg-reconfigure rt3090-dkms

This will take a wee while. Then, to activate the change, you need to:

modprobe rt3090sta

You don’t need to reboot the machine – you should see the Network Manager come to life in the top-right of the screen.

Et voila!

I must admit that I find it strange that this is necessary at all, on one of the most popular netbooks, using a netbook-specific netbook distribution of Linux. But anyway, there you have it, problem solved!